Holocaust And Human Rights Education

Educators and students face many questions when exploring the history of the Holocaust. This book addresses the ways in which we teach and learn about the Holocaust, applying sociological concepts and discussing the wider implications of the Holocaust on human rights and international law.

Educators and students face many questions when exploring the history of the Holocaust. This book addresses the ways in which we teach and learn about the Holocaust, applying sociological concepts and discussing the wider implications of the Holocaust on human rights and international law.

When Glenn Kurtz stumbles upon an old family film in his parents' closet in Florida, he has no inkling of its historical significance or of the impact it will have on his life. The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive. Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history. One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival—a monument to a lost world.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums in many parts of the world. As a field for discourse and a body of practice, it is rich, multidimensional and innovative. But the history of the Holocaust is complex and challenging, and can render teaching it a complex and daunting area of work. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowledge in English secondary schools, Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies provides important knowledge about and insights into classroom teaching and learning. It sheds light on key challenges in Holocaust education, including the impact of misconceptions and misinformation, the dilemmas of using atrocity images in the classroom, and teaching in ethnically diverse environments. Overviews of the most significant debates in Holocaust education provide wider context for the classroom evidence, and contribute to a book that will act as a guide through some of the most vexed areas of Holocaust pedagogy for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policymakers.

"International interest in Holocaust education has reached new heights in recent years. This historic event has long been central to cultures of remembrance in those countries where the genocide of the Jewish people occurred. But other parts of the world have now begun to recognize the history of the Holocaust as an effective means to teach about mass violence and to promote human rights and civic duty, testifying to the emergence of this pivotal historical event as a universal frame of reference. In this new, globalized context, how is the Holocaust represented and taught? How do teachers handle this excessively complex and emotionally loaded subject in fast-changing multicultural European societies still haunted by the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators? Why and how is it taught in other areas of the world that have only little if any connection with the history of the Jewish people? Holocaust Education in a Global Context will explore these questions."--page 10.

How do schools worldwide treat the Holocaust as a subject? In which countries does the Holocaust form part of classroom teaching? Are representations of the Holocaust always accurate, balanced and unprejudiced in curricula and textbooks? This study, carried out by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, compares for the first time representations of the Holocaust in school textbooks and national curricula. Drawing on data which includes countries in which there exists no or little information about representations of the Holocaust, the study shows where the Holocaust is established in official guidelines, and contains a close textbook study, focusing on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of representations and historical narratives. The book highlights evolving practices worldwide and thus provides education stakeholders with comprehensive documentation about current trends in curricula directives and textbook representations of the Holocaust. It further formulates recommendations that will help policy-makers provide the educational means by which pupils may develop Holocaust literacy.

"Collected voices make clear why Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education are more crucial than ever. After the Holocaust brings together scholarship, activism, poetry, and personal narratives from some of the last living survivors of the Holocaust to tackle the changing face of genocide and human rights education in the 21st century. The collected voices draw on decades of research on the Holocaust and discuss how it can help us understand and educate about a range of human rights issues throughout history, and, in turn, that local histories of other human rights atrocities can shed light on the way the Holocaust is represented and taught. Advancing the dialogue between civic advocacy, public remembrance, and research, the contributors of this edited collection discuss Holocaust education's broad relevance in a human rights framework. 'The first- and second-generation survivor accounts are treasures--invaluable reflections that anchor this collection.'--David MacDonald, author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation"--

Holocaust and Human Behavior uses readings, primary source material, and short documentary films to examine the challenging history of the Holocaust and prompt reflection on our world today